What is the Te Atatū Sound Project?

This project started when I had a sculpture excepted for the 2016 Harbourview Sculpture Trail, my work was about exploring the link between the site for the sculpture, which sits directly above the small Spanish village of El Gastor. This got my imagination going and thinking about childhood holidays digging holes at the beach in the UK, and where I might end up if I continued digging and usually it was New Zealand or Australia.

Now living in New Zealand and having the opportunity to use these memories, combined with the fact that a number of places in New Zealand are directly above places in Spain, Portugal and Morocco, to make an artwork about digging through the earth. This lead to the work ‘You Say Hola, I Say Hello’, which took the form of a large tin can telephone with a cable that ran down one of the storm drains at the Harbourview Park site.

Part of the work was a soundscape, this was a series of recordings from the area around El Gastor and played through the sculpture when a button was pressed, well that was the theory, in practice due partly to a crucial part of the sculpture being to Sweden rather than New Zealand, meant Plan B and then Plan C had to be put in place, some changes had to be made, but in the end we got the sounds from the other side of the world playing through the sculpture.

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While I was installing the work I also spent 4 days at Rutherford Primary School working with students to make their own soundscape of the school, this involved exploring all aspects of school life through sound recordings and the students made some wonderful recordings. These will form part of the ongoing project as well as being an opportunity for the students to make connections with children from El Gastor and learn about their lives.

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The next stage is to open up the project to the whole Te Atatū community and start building up a collection of sound recordings of life on The Peninsula. There will be no restrictions on the sounds that can be recorded, as long as they are your own recordings, they are suitable for all ages and each recording is 30 seconds or less in duration. The sounds will be put online and build up into a soundscape depicting life in Te Atatū, in time it is hoped that as the sound resource grows, people will be able to use the sounds in their own work and sound projects.

Another part of the project will be the development of links with El Gastor, I have already been in contact with some people there and we hope to find ways to collaborate through the sharing of sounds to build up a collaborative soundscape reflect the sounds of Te Atatū and El Gastor.

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The next step will be two workshops at the Te Atatū Library one on Friday 10 June, 1 – 3pm and the next one on Saturday 11 June from 10.30 – 12.30pm. These will be an opportunity to here more about the project, making sound recordings and uploading them to the internet. If time allows we shall go on a quick sound walk around the area to collect some sounds.